N° 74: Girls Night In: Food Talk with Lena Dunham
LD on takeout, WASP food, and final requests
Good morning,
Today, I’m very excited to share my interview with Lena Dunham, creator (i.e., executive producer, writer, director) of the HBO series Girls, and, most recently, author of the memoir Famesick, which became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller upon its release last month.
I’m not practiced in the art of literary critique, but I can tell you I laughed innumerable times reading Famesick and it is, as the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry called it at the New Haven event she recently co-hosted with Dunham, “a page-turner”—unsurprising considering Dunham’s propulsive, hilarious writing for the New Yorker, for TV, and on her own Subtack, Good Thing Going. Needless to say, I highly recommend both the memoir and Dunham’s Substack.
“Wow, you’ve really been through wars,” Dunham’s now-husband quips in Famesick immediately before asking “What do you want for dinner?” This basically summarizes my approach to the lighthearted questions I posed to Dunham about food; While there’s talk in Famesick of dieting, of disordered eating, of “counting my almonds, and eating cottage cheese with Splenda for all three meals…,” of spitefully eating cheeseburgers after ten years of not eating meat, I wanted to ask Dunham about the pleasurable memories and presence of food throughout her life. And it turned out there was plenty to discuss: her favorite takeout and room-service meals, the one thing she’s successfully cooked, what her final prison meal would be, and what she feeds her pet pigs.
Other recommendations (before we get to the interview):
Listen to
Norteña, the new Julieta Venegas album that was coincidentally released while I was in Mexico City (more soon on why I was there!);
SALT PIG: A Home Cooking Podcast, featuring the soothing, classically NPR-worthy voices of hosts Lukas Volger and Elinor Hutton as they talk everyday food topics;
Get a copy of
The Underdog, Guardian food columnist Felicity Cloake’s first NOVEL, which is out in the UK (I haven’t yet read it, as I’m saving it for summer);
Love in the Afternoon, and Evening: Essays and Conversations on Soap Operas by Charlotte Druckman (charlotte) and Mayukh Sen (It’s not a niche I have any personal history with, but if there’s anyone whose writing can tempt me to learn about soap operas, it’s these two.);
Make
any of the comforting and brilliant recipes by Jordan Smith over on his Save Me A Slice Substack;
my New York Times spiraled spinach and feta phyllo pie ('striftí spanakotyrópita’—here’s a gift link). It’s not new, but it’s one of my favorite things on the planet to eat.
Let me know what you think if you listen to/read/make any of the above (or below). Talk to you soon.
Brian
*Formal Assignment P.S. is for paid subscribers. It’s less than $3 a month for an annual subscription.
---
GIRLS NIGHT IN
An Interview with Lena Dunham
---
This interview was conducted via e-mail and has been edited for clarity.
PART I: GROWING UP DUNHAM
Brian Levy: Pick one: pancakes, waffles, or French toast.
Lena Dunham: I’m not kicking any of these out of bed, but if I’m being given options? French fucking toast. It’s a consistency you get nowhere else in nature.
Right answer! You’re turning 40!1 Can you define each of your four lived decades with a food, restaurant, or takeout source?
Okay, the first ten years of my life were Empire Szechuan takeout- my mom wants to say it was a treat, but we were dining out of the carton 3 to 4 nights a week. Supposedly, once the doorbell rang when my parents were having a cocktail party and I screamed, “Dinner!”
Teenage life was centered around Happy Day diner in Brooklyn Heights, now Montague Diner, which is chic and fun, but back then it was a roach-infested, disco-fries-serving, absolutely mediocre diner where the teens went to hook up in corner booths but I mostly hung out there on the weekends with my father while he read the newspaper and ate a turkey burger melt.
My twenties I associate almost exclusively with the breakfast truck that served the cast and crew of Girls—an egg white, feta and spinach wrap, because I hadn’t yet learned that avoiding the yolks would not change my life in a meaningful way, only drain it of pleasure.
And the culinary highlight of the last ten years has been my husband serving me eggs and soldiers on a tray nearly every morning, usually with an inventive vegetable side. (Last week was snow peas with pecorino. I mean, the ingenuity!) It took me many, many years to understand that food isn’t just a source of shame or means to avoid fainting; it’s also a way that people show their love.
Do or did either of your parents cook? (Based on your New Yorker essay “Deliverance,” in which you wrote “The only snack my mom ever makes is raw cauliflower with a little cup of mayonnaise for dipping,” I think the answer is no, but maybe things have changed?)
I have to give it up to my mother; she had a cooking renaissance during the dog days of the pandemic. Amongst many experiments (“Tik Tok pasta” is my favorite) she taught herself to make incredible bread pudding and ice cream cake. Her ice cream cakes utilize unexpected flavors, cookie crumbs–and she always makes sure to marble and stack varied colors. They’ve become a signature dish. It gives me hope that maybe I, too, could learn to whip a few things up.
So, comparatively, she’s the Barefoot Contessa now, but that snack [of cauliflower and mayo] still feels like home–and I can’t wait to be my own future child’s living nightmare, muttering, “What more do you need? It’s a carb, a vegetable and a healthy fat!”
My father can make two things: pancakes and scrambled eggs. While he’s an atypical patriarch in many ways, that feels very classic “dad” (because oh yeah, he also mans the grill about twice a year).
Did you have many extended-family meals growing up? What were the WASP meals like versus the Jewish ones? (I’m also half Jewish, but the other half is Catholic mutt. WASPs fascinate me!)
So my WASP family (they’re out there! It’s a shock!) ate basically three things: steak, chicken, and… uh… I can’t think of a third. My grandmother (who considered herself a “swamp Yankee” whatever that means) used to make the same meal every Friday night: London broil, Portuguese rolls with butter, iceberg lettuce, a baked potato. Then she would serve Entenman’s pound cake from the freezer, not *that* thawed. The next morning, she would use the leftover steak and make me a sandwich. When you’re a kid you’re very suggestible, so I thought it was a masterful meal, restaurant quality, even better the morning after. I didn’t understand why my mother always got Chinese takeout and ate it next to us, but now I understand that she was a Jewish girl both confused by the limited portions and unwilling to chew for hours on the well-done steak with a vaguely synthetic seasoning. I do think my grandmother’s love imbued it with something special, because pretty much nothing has matched that food for me. I have been a vegetarian for years and it would still be my final request in prison. But I guess I just miss her.
My primary memories of my maternal grandmother cooking are Seder-related; she made brisket, chicken, teensy little roast potatoes, a jello mold. It’s funny because that meal was 1,000 times more luxurious and flavorful than what my other grandma cooked, but I had an intimacy and ease with the London broil grandma that was the difference between being in hog heaven and whining nonstop/demanding that we pull over for pizza on the way home. These are life’s mysteries.
It seems unlikely that you’d have a family recipe you’d like to share with me…?
Our family is woefully short on recipes, but one of the things my mother used to make–only during the summer, and even then only when we had special company–was a derby pie. It’s a rich chocolate pie that is the consistency of hot mud. It was a recipe she had gotten from her art school best friend Hudson Talbott’s mother, an elegant southern lady who knew things like what pie you serve at the derby, and my mother memorized it. I love imagining her getting pie lessons from this woman who was so unlike her own mother (my grandma would never have fucked with four sticks of butter.) I can picture her getting her hands dirty as she was instructed on how to roll a pie crust (she ultimately went with a frozen crust, cuz we live to cut corners in our house.)
Hudson passed away recently, but he was the creator of the children’s book series We’re Back! about dinosaurs roaming New York. He signed all the books “uncle Hud.”
[Editor’s note: Here is my Derby pie recipe, for free in the Guardian)
I recently wrote an essay based around memories of school lunch, so I have the subject on the brain. Do any formative memories of such meals come to mind?
I loved this essay. I do believe I’ve blocked school lunch…
In “Deliverance,” you write of your youthful rejection of shepherd’s pie. I also always found this a disappointing dish, too, especially given it inevitably inspires comparison to its far superior relative, pot pie. Are there any foods you hated as a kid that you now like or even love?
As a child I had such a phobia of eggs that I would line up all the salt and pepper shakers in Joe Junior’s diner to block my father’s plate. Now, I recognize them to be a perfect food (unless they’re hard boiled or deviled, in which case I am running for the exit.)
As you know we have pigs, and I really wanted chickens to join them. But my father spent the first ten years of his life on a commercial chicken farm (one of my grandfather’s many failed businesses) and has chicken trauma.
It’s hard to know what came first, Brian…
WWLS? (WHAT WOULD LENA SERVE?)
Do you host dinner parties? If so, what do you serve?
I love having people over, and my vibe is takeout on nice plates. Flowers from the bodega. My best friend Russell’s boyfriend Mark once told me I have “a real POV with a takeout menu” and that meant a lot to me.
Has any cookbook ever intrigued you for any reason? Ever been intrigued to the point of buying one? (You write in “Deliverance” that your sibling “stole my only cookbook, the one that accompanied my New Year’s resolution to make more soup. What cookbook was that?)
